Civil religion's antagonist.

Editor

Two dominant features of the "civil religion" I wrote about in June (see editorial) are the ideas that today, of all virtues needed in society, the only really important one is "tolerance," and that among offences the most noxious one is intolerance. First, these ideas pressure people in society to "conform," and be "politically correct." Then, when it becomes a battle between ideology and religion--in our case atheism and agnosticism against Catholicism--each with its allies--what was relatively restricted and non-threatening turns ugly demanding the surrender of basic beliefs.

Anti-Catholicism

In early May the American syndicated columnist Joseph Sobran observed:

"What is startling is the perpetual passion of anti-Catholicism. You'd think that by now people who reject Catholicism would calmly ignore its teachings as old and irrelevant superstitions. After all, the Church has none of her old political power, adherence is now totally voluntary, and she has enough trouble getting her own children to listen to her.

"But Catholicism still has a strange moral authority, and many people are unable to achieve a calm and assured disbelief. They are still driven to discredit the Church -- perhaps for the same reason so many of us believe in her. Catholicism offers a complete and comprehensive morality, one which most of us still recognize as the faith of our fathers. Bit by bit, the world, including other churches, has abandoned much of this morality; the Church continues to teach it, even when some of her own priests scandalously violate it.

"A few generations ago, nearly all Christians shared the same sexual morality. They abhorred artificial birth control, for example. Many state laws banning the sale of contraceptive devices in this country were passed by Protestant majorities while Catholics were politically weak. Gradually, however, Protestants ceased to oppose contraception, and Catholicism almost alone continued to condemn it. What had long been a consensus became censured as a 'Catholic position.' We now see the same process well under way with abortion and homosexuality...

I became and remain a Catholic because the Church maintains a consistent morality -- while the rest of the world keeps veering off into moral fads. My conviction that she is right is only strengthened by the world's strident demand that she change along with it, as if it were a sort of moral duty to change one's principles, like underwear, with reasonable frequency."

(The Wanderer, May 12/02).

Sobran makes two points: there is a culture war between secularism and Catholicism; and its subject is the sexual-family-moral character of our society. Three articles in this issue speak to the latter: "The Marc Hall case" (p. 14); "Bill C-56 and the stem-cell"(p. 17); and "Canada, a moral nation?" (p. 40). One article, "Catholics in public life" (p. 38) reviews historical aspects of Catholics in conflict with the state. What is new is the subject of the conflict, not the conflict itself.

A bird's eye view

In times past Catholics of every period in history have found themselves persecuted. It took 300 years before Rome exchanged enmity for patronage; no sooner done than patronage stifled the Christian community and Popes had to assert the right of the Church to her own autonomy and jurisdiction. From then on, for fifteen hundred more years right into our own 21st century, the often unseen struggle between baron and bishop, emperor and pope, state and Church has continued. It was accompanied by external disasters such as the Barbarian invasions, Muslim conquests, Saracen and Viking raids, and internal ones such as the break between Eastern and Western Christianity, fratricidal wars between kings and cities in feudal Europe, and then between rising new nations, the ferocity of which was greatly increased when Western Christianity divided into hostile camps.

With the French Revolution of 1789 history experienced its first totalitarian state, imbued with anti-religious ideology. It announced the end of feudal society, the triumph of science and the abolition of Christianity. Two other such regimes, much more sophisticated--in 1917 and 1933--have come and gone, except in China.

In Canada no one is expecting to have to withstand the horrors of the persecutors described above. We are a peaceful and democratic nation; we elect our own leaders; we have laws and magistrates. So do the people in the United States and Western Europe. What then do we fear?

The difference lies in the nature of the struggle. The revolutions of 1789, 1917 and 1933 attempted to impose their ideologies by force. Today's materialism seeks to seduce the world with pleasant and comfortable hedonism into voluntarily abandoning God and His laws.

It is significant I believe, that in the Leger Marketing survey of February 2002 on "Canadians and Morality" (see p.40), being atheist is regarded by almost 75 per cent of Canadians as of little significance. Yet atheism is an offence against the first and greatest commandment: "Hear Israel, the Lord our God is the one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength" (Dt 5:4-5; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:25-28; Matt 22:34-40).